I've recently been watching a lot of Bollywood movies and decided to dive into some Hindi literature. Surprisingly, online I see very few Hindi-language authors mentioned, even for nonfiction. Most Indians whose opinions were sought seem to prefer English, but one name came up consistently as a good Hindi-language author: Premchand. Mushi Premchand aka Dhanpat Rai Srivastava was an Indian author of short stories, and some/many Indians study his works in their Hindi classes in high school. I decided that would be a good place to start, but I couldn't find them at a reasonable price anywhere except Amazon India. Unfortunately, no sellers on Amazon India ship to the US, so I used a freight forwarder. For anyone curious, this is how the process goes: I created an account at Shoppre (who have a good reputation, but are known to be pretty expensive.) They gave me a virtual address in Bengaluru, Karnakata that I could give Amazon India. I put my order in for the Premchand box set and a box of Mysore Pak. The total came to around $25 USD for 15 paperbacks and one box of pak. One thing to note is that Shoppre's list of things they won't ship is long and includes lots of things you might not expect like pepper and salt, glue, hard drives, most electronics, items containing batteries or magnets, etc.) The books were delivered to my virtual address in 3 days, the Pak took 5 days. Once the items were received, I had to upload the invoice from Amazon India, so that they could accurately record the value for export. They also repack things into a single shipment. After submitting the invoices for both packages, they went into review status for one business day. Then Shoppre presented me with a final invoice to ship the items: $75 (on top of the $25 to actually buy the things.) It ended up being 10 pounds in total. I paid the fee via credit card, and they prepared it for shipping. They sent me the tracking number and will be sending it DHL. They allow your items to stay in the "ready to ship" status for 10 days, after which they'll charge you 100 rupees per day storage fee (~$1.17 as of writing.) In my case, I paid the invoice the day they were ready to ship. Overall it was a simple, if expensive process. There are other providers and I've heard that Shoppre is on the expensive side. I'll follow up around May 28 to find out what the customs duty process looks like (I imagine also pretty expensive) and how my package looks when it arrives.
I don't! But I'm trying to learn and I find having some written material the easiest way to get started. I'm using Pimsleur Hindi right now, and will transition to some more intensive resources once I finish it.
I don't have a specific reason, other than that it's a new challenge. My "life goal" languages are French and Arabic. I can read French reasonably well (so I'd put myself at high B1/low B2 on the CEFR scale) though my other skills are rustier, and Arabic I've never got off the ground after learning the script, but I'd like to pursue formal coursework eventually. There's always a third language floating around to distract me from the other two. I've spent some time with Farsi and Korean and didn't connect deeply to either one. The Indians I know tell me that Hindi is, for lack of a more elegant term, fairly useless for an English speaker to learn since it is not the lingua franca in India, but being able to watch Bollywood without English subtitles would be neat. Plus being able to understand Urdu with some additional effort would be a plus.
Arabic is intriguing, but the problem is "which one?" since it's not one single language. I learned a little Spanish in high school, a surprising amount of which I remember, and I picked up some Antillean Creole when I lived in Dominica but I'm not that great at it. These days I'm learning ASL (for relationship reasons).
French, getting back into practice and reaching adult fluency. I took full-day French Immersion from senior kindergarten to grade 3 inclusive and I became functionally fluent there, but then I transferred to a gifted program and there wasn’t a program combining gifted and French Immersion in my Anglophone school board in Ontario at the time. My father’s-side roots are from the Anglophone minority in a predominantly Francophone region in Quebec. Polish, the language of my mother’s-side roots. My Polish-American grandparents used Polish at home as their private language to shield conversations from their kids, who learned English. Perhaps inevitably my mother and her siblings covertly learned enough Polish to figure out much of what their parents were saying. The University of Kansas offers undergraduate Polish and other Slavic and Eurasian languages online. Spanish now. I just completed Spanish I and almost all Spanish II on Sophia and I’ve enjoyed it! ASL is a possibility, but feels like a stretch goal for me. My tactile learning can really take time. Ball State University has a sequence of courses in ASL and Deaf culture appropriate to start as a complete beginner, which can lead to a graduate certificate. Several schools have undergraduate ASL online, notably including Troy University.
Update: I got a text message that my parcel would be delivered today! Then I got another text with a "follow my parcel" map, Uber-style. Looks like there are only a couple stops ahead of mine, so I should expect my parcel in the next hour or two. I was expecting delivery on May 28 so that is shockingly ahead of schedule.
Success! The box came very well-packed. Everything was bubble-wrapped (each individual book and box) and taped, and there was additional packing material so there was no loose space. The pak is at the bottom of the picture. Now, to start my summer reading.
That’s so wonderful! I speak Arabic. My family is from Egypt. I can try to help. I will admit that my Arabic is a bit wonky at times.
